“With those guys”: Centaurs. He introduces all of those who were bested by them so that he will seem to be superior in advice even to those who were stronger. He also doesn’t mention that Peleus was a friend of Agamemnon in order to avoid seeming to criticize Achilles, if his father obeyed him [Agamemnon] in something but he [Achilles] did not.”
“…and Tydeus’ son grabbed a stone with his hand—
A great effort which two men couldn’t replicate,
The kinds of men mortals are today. Well, he lifted it easily, even by himself”
“The kinds of people mortals are today.” This means that they are much lower than the men of the heroic age. This distance of time makes the excesses of the heroes more believable.”
“…a rock not even two of the best men of the people
Could heft easily onto a cart from the ground,
The kinds of men mortals are today. He lifted it easily even by himself.”
Jean Racine (1639-1699), in his adaptation of Iphigenia at Aulis, placed the blame for Agamemnon’s moral waywardness squarely on Odysseus. In other words, Odysseus made him do it:
Racine. Iphigenia.
Agamemnon to attendant (70-78):
I wanted to disband the army.
Odysseus seemed to support my wishes;
He let that first rush of words go unchecked.
But soon he marshaled his cruel techniques:
He conjured for me honor and country;
All the people, the kings, who obey my commands;
The Asian empire promised to Greece;
And how, sacrificing the state for my daughter,
A fameless king, I’d grow old in my household.
Je voulais sur-le-champ congédier l’armée.
Ulysse en apparence approuvant mes discours,
De ce premier torrent laissa passer le cours.
Mais bientôt rappelant sa cruelle industrie,
Il me représenta l’honneur et la patrie,
Tout ce peuple, ces rois à mes ordres soumis,
Et l’empire d’Asie à la Grèce promis.
De quel front immolant tout l’État à ma fille,
Roi sans gloire, j’irais vieillir dans ma famille!
Odysseus to Agamemnon (285-296):
Think! You owe your daughter to Greece:
You’ve promised her to us, and on that promise,
Calchas, whom the Greeks consult daily,
Has foretold the return of unfailing winds.
If what comes contradicts his predictions,
Do you think Calchas will stay silent?
That you can blunt his accusations?
That Greeks will say the gods lied, and not blame you?
Deprived of their sacrifice, who knows what Greeks,
Rightly angry, in their view, might do?
Beware of forcing an enraged people,
My lord, to choose between you and the gods.
Songez-y: Vous devez votre fille à la Grèce:
Vous nous l’avez promise; et, sur cette promesse,
Calchas, par tous les Grecs consulté chaque jour,
Leur a prédit des vents l’infaillible retour.
À ses prédictions si l’effet est contraire,
Pensez-vous que Calchas continue à se taire;
Que ses plaintes, qu’en vain vous voudrez apaiser,
Laissent mentir les Dieux, sans vous en accuser?
Et qui sait ce qu’aux Grecs, frustrés de leur victime,
Peut permettre un courroux qu’ils croiront légitime?
Gardez-vous de réduire un peuple furieux,
Seigneur, à prononcer entre vous, et les Dieux.
Roland Barthes characterizes Racine’s representation of Odysseus this way:
Roland Barthes. On Racine (Editions du Seuil. 1963.105).
“He possesses the traits of what Votaire calls with admiration ‘the great politician’: the sense of collective interest, the objective appreciation of facts and their consequences, the lack of self respect; and he shrouds all his pragmatism in windbag rhetoric and continual blackmail styled as high morals [honor and country].”
“Il possède les traits de ce que Voltaire appelait avec admiration le grand politique: le sens de l’intérêt collectif, l’appréciation objective des faits et de leurs conséquences, l’absence d’amour-propre, enveloppant tout ce pragmatisme d’une rhétorique phraseuse et d’un chantage continu à la grande morale.”
Odysseus and Diomedes have learned that King Rhesus, bivouacking with his Thracian contingent, has with him some especially large and handsome horses. The warriors want them:
Homer. Iliad.10.469-493.
“The two advanced through battle arms and black blood,
and pushing on, quickly reached the Thracian force.
The men, spent, were asleep on the ground. Their war gear,
so fine, lay beside them, neatly arranged
in three rows. Each man’s yoked horses stood by him.
Rhesus slept among his men, hard by his fast horses.
They were tied to the chariot’s upper rim.
Odysseus saw him first and pointed:
‘Diomedes, that’s him! And those are the horses
the guy we killed, Dolon, told us about!
Come on! Unleash your awesome force!
Don’t stand here armored for nothing. Untie the horses.
Better still, you kill the men. I’ll deal with the horses.’
He said this. Bright-eyed Athena then inspired Diomedes
with fury: left and right he killed. Awful moans came
from men struck by his sword. The earth flowed red with blood.
Just as a lion coming upon untended flocks
(whether goats or sheep) bears evil in his pounce,
Tydeus’s son coursed through the Thracian force
until he’d killed twelve.
As for artful Odysseus–
whenever Tydeus’s son struck a man with his sword,
Odysseus would drag him aside by the leg,
thinking: this is how the horses with handsome manes
will pass through with ease, their hearts not trembling
trampling on bodies. They aren’t used to that yet.”
Odysseus’ sister Ktimene is mentioned by the swineherd Eumaios but never by Odysseus. The scholia connect her to one of Odysseus’ companions. The evidence for this seems to be the fact that Ktimene was sent to Same for marriage (where Eurylochus is from) and a kinship term used for him by Odysseus. Also of interest, according to the scholion, Odysseus may have had more sisters.
Homer, Odyssey 15.364-41
Strong Ktimenê, the youngest of the children she bore.
I was raised with her, and she honored me little less.
But when we both made it to much-praised youth,
They gave her to Samê and received much in return
But she gave me a cloak, tunic and clothing
Dressing me finely and give me sandals for my feet
And sent me to the field. But she loved me more in her heart.
“She bore the youngest of the children”: [this means] of the female children. For his father only had Odysseus [for a son]. There were more sisters of Odysseus.”
“So he spoke, and I was turning over in my thoughts
As I began to draw the sharp-edged sword next to my thick thigh,
Whether I should cut off his head and drive him to the ground
Even though he really was my relative. But our companions
Were restraining me with gentle words from all sides.”
“Pêos: A relative by marriage. In-law. Also, “in-lawness” [Pêosunê], relation-by-marriage. There is also Pêôn [genitive plural], for “of relatives-by-marriage. Homer has: “relatives and friends” [Il. 3.163]
“…There is a difference between in-law and friend. People who have no connection to you by birth are friends. In-laws are related to you through marriage.”
“Now, let us go out and test ourselves at every kind of competition so that this stranger may tell his friends once he gets home how much we are better than the rest at boxing and wrestling, and jumping and running.”
[now, let us go out..]“Why were the Phaeacians after dinner competing in the bare competition, the race and the double race, and not any other sport? For these are wholly the activities of leisurely people. Perhaps because it was necessary to make this suitable to their character, since the poetry is imitation [mimesis], [the poet] composed it thus. For they say “the feast and the cithara and dances are always dear to us”
[lemma] And how does he say later “For we are not preeminent at boxing or wrestling”? Certainly, in however much they are inexperienced with Odysseus, they think they conquer all of them in these games when in the actual performance once he speaks of himself, Odysseus boasted about the rest of the competitions, begging out only in the race and responding to the praise of Alkinoos when he said “but we run swiftly with our feet and are best at ships..” (247)
“When they had all delighted their minds with the competitions,
Then Laodamas, the child of Alkinoos, spoke to them:
“Come, friends, let us ask the guest if he knows any sport
And excels at it. For he is not bad in respect to his form at least:
His thighs and shins and both hands above—
He has strong neck and great strength. He lacks little of youth
But he has been broken by many troubles.
For I say that nothing else overwhelms a man more terribly
Than the sea, even if he is very strong.”
Scholia T
[Lemma] [he got these things are also from meeting [him]. For they are using irony because they believe they are superior in this pursuit. And, moreover, he also suggests a good character, so that, if he should do poorly, he might have a good excuse in the ruining of the body.”
“Euryalus responded and answered to him.
‘Laodamas, you have spoken this plan according to what is right.
Now go out and call to him and tell him this idea.”
They came to the Myrmidon huts and ships
And found Achilles happy-hearted with his clear-toned
handsomely designed lyre with its silver bridge.
He’d gotten it from the spoils of Etion’s sacked city.
With it he cheered his heart when he sang of the fame of men.
When he, Alexander, went up to Ilium, he made offerings to Athena and poured libations to the heroes. He also anointed the grave of Achilles with oil, raced before it (naked, as is the custom) with his comrades, and placed garlands on it. He declared Achilles happy, for in life he had a faithful friend and in death a great herald of his name.
While he was there, touring the city and seeing the sights, someone asked if he would like to see Paris’s lyre. He had little interest in that, he said, but he would like to see the lyre of Achilles, the one to which he sang of the fame and deeds of brave men.
Ovid. Metamorphosis. Book IV. 373-388 (Salmacis and Hermaphroditus).
The gods answered Salmacis’s prayers,
for their intertwined bodies meld
and their faces resolve into one.
When you graft a branch to a tree’s bark
the two things fuse, and grow that way, before your eyes.
Just so, where their limbs meet in tight embrace
there aren’t two bodies now, but one with two natures:
boy/girl, neither/both–so they appear.
Where a man dove into the flowing waters
there you see him made a weak-limbed half-man.
And in his no-longer-male voice, his arms raised,
Hermaphroditus cries: “My father and mother,
do your son who bears both your names this service:
whoever should enter this pool a man
may he emerge half-man, enervated at once
by the waters’ touch.”
The parents of the two-natured child were moved
and agreed to drug the stream with filth.
vota suos habuere deos; nam mixta duorum
corpora iunguntur, faciesque inducitur illis
una. velut, si quis conducat cortice ramos,
crescendo iungi pariterque adolescere cernit,
sic, ubi complexu coierunt membra tenaci,
nec duo sunt sed forma duplex, nec femina dici
nec puer ut possit, neutrumque et utrumque videntur.
ergo ubi se liquidas, quo vir descenderat, undas
semimarem fecisse videt mollitaque in illis
membra, manus tendens, sed non iam voce virili
Hermaphroditus ait: “Nato date munera vestro,
et pater et genetrix, amborum nomen habenti:
quisquis in hos fontes vir venerit, exeat inde
semivir et tactis subito mollescat in undis.”
Motus uterque parens nati rata verba biformis
fecit et incesto fontem medicamine tinxit.
“He put a large meat block on a burning fire
And placed on top of it the back of a sheep and a fat goat
And a slab of succulent hog, rich with fat.
As Automedon held them, Achilles cut.
Then he sliced them well into pieces and put them on spits
While the son of Menoitios, a godlike man, built up the fire.
But when the fire had burned up and the flame was receding,
He spread out the coal and stretched the spits over it.
Once he put the meat on the fire he seasoned it with holy salt.
When he cooked the meat and distributed it on platters,
Patroclus retrieved bread and placed it on a table
In beautiful baskets. Then Achilles gave out the meat.”
“A great calm listens to me, where I listen for hope.”
-Paul Valery, “Narcissus Speaks”
Ovid. Metamorphoses. Book III. 423-434 (Echo & Narcissus).
He desired himself without knowing it.
The one adoring was himself the one adored.
He pursues and he is the one pursued.
In equal parts he lights the flame and he burns.
How often his vain kisses for the trickster stream!
How often, grasping for the neck he saw there,
He plunged his arms amid the waters
And there failed to clasp himself!
What he sees, he does not understand.
Yet, what he sees he burns for.
What beguiles his eyes sustains his confusion.
Naif, why grasp in vain at a skirting image?
What you seek is nowhere.
What you love, just by turning away, you lose.
What you see is reflection’s shadow.
There’s nothing to it: it comes, it stays, with you.
With you it will leave, if you can leave.
Se cupit imprudens et qui probat, ipse probatur,
dumque petit, petitur, pariterque accendit et ardet.
Inrita fallaci quotiens dedit oscula fonti!
In mediis quotiens visum captantia collum
bracchia mersit aquis, nec se deprendit in illis!
Quid videat, nescit: sed quod videt, uritur illo,
atque oculos idem, qui decipit, incitat error.
Credule, quid frusta simulacra fugacia captas?
quod petis, est nusquam; quod amas, avertere, perdes.
Ista repercussae, quam cernis, imaginis umbra est:
nil habet ista sui; tecum venitque manetque,
tecum discedet, si tu discedere possis.
Caravaggio. Narcissus. 1597-1599. Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica. Rome, Italy.
“Citizens, this elder pride of Argives,
I will feel not shame at revealing
my spousal love to you. In time, human fear
turns to dust. I will tell you of my own
miserable live, not something I learned from others,
all that time when this man was below the city of Troy.”
This week we trturn to the first play of Aeschylus’ Oresteia, the Agamemnon. How famous is the story of Orestes and his father? So famous that it is the story Zeus contemplates at the beginning of the Homeric Odyssey as he looks down in frustration on the man who murdered Agamemnon. Atreus’ son, Agamemnon, appears in the middle of the epic (book 11) and at its end, complaining at each point bitterly about his disloyal wife, Klytemnestra, and praising the vengeance meted out by his son Orestes.
The story of the family of Agamemnon, however, extends before the Trojan War and then after until the death of Achilles’ son Neoptolemos. it starts back with Tantalos and Pelops in Asia Minor before it moves to the Peloponnese through sacrilegious meals, infanticide and fraternal war, all themes highlighted in the main cause of Klytemnestra’s rage, the killing of their daughter Iphigenia at Aulis.
If this story sounds familiar, it is because it is! In this series, we have heard variations of this tale from Sophocles and Euripides, contemplating both its beginnings and its ends. Indeed, ancient audiences would have been as familiar with the story as Zeus at the beginning of the Odyssey, shaking their heads and wondering how this version will play out.
This play begins with Agamemnon’s return home, but focuses on Klytemnestra’s anger and her power. It features some of the most challenging and memorable choral odes extant from the ancient world. It has a raving, yet lucid Kassandra. And at the core of the play, a murderous king’s bloody return home.
Aeschylus, Agamemnon 914-917
“Child of Leda, guardian of my home,
“You have spoken aptly to my absence,
Since you have gone on at length. But proper praise
Ought to be a prize won from different sources.”
“Whoever pronounced a name
So thoroughly true?
Wasn’t it someone we’d not see
Guiding the tongue with luck
From a foreknowledge of fate?
Who named the spear-bride,
Struggled-over woman
Helen?
For, appropriately,
That ship-killer [hele-nas], man-killer [hel-andros]
City-killer [hele-ptolis], sailed
From her fine-spun, curtains
On the breath of great Zephyr
and many-manned bands
Of shield-bearers followed
The vanished journey struck
By the oars to the banks
Of leafy Simois
Artistic Director: Paul O’Mahony (Out of Chaos Theatre) Director of Outreach: Amy Pistone (Gonzaga University) Executive Producer: Allie Marbry (Center for Hellenic Studies) Producers: Keith DeStone (Center for Hellenic Studies), Hélène Emeriaud, Janet Ozsolak, and Sarah Scott (Kosmos Society) Poster Artist: John Koelle Poster Designer: Allie Marbry (Center for Hellenic Studies)
Aristophanes, Assemblywomen 176-183
“[Zeus] puts mortals on
The journey of comprehension.
And made this the powerful law:
We learn by suffering.
Pain-recalling trouble trickles
Through the heart in sleep—
And wisdom comes just so
To the unwilling.
The gods seated on their sacred seats
Bestow a hard grace I think.”
If then in Sophocles the play is concentrated in the figures themselves, and in Euripides is to be retrieved from flashes of poetry and questions far flung and unanswered, Aeschylus makes these little dramas (the Agamemnon has 1663 lines; Lear about 2600) tremendous by stretching every phrase to the utmost, by sending them floating forth in metaphors, by bidding them rise up and stalk eyeless and majestic through the scene. To understand him it is not so necessary to understand Greek as to understand poetry. It is necessary to take that dangerous leap through the air without the support of words which Shakespeare also asks of us. For words, when opposed to such a blast of meaning, must give out, must be blown astray, and only by collecting in companies convey the meaning which each one separately is too weak to express. Connecting them in a rapid flight of the mind we know instantly and instinctively what they mean, but could not decant that meaning afresh into any other words. There is an ambiguity which is the mark of the highest poetry; we cannot know exactly what it means. Take this from the Agamemnon for instance–
ὀμμάτων δ’ ἐν ἀχηνίαις
ἔρρει πᾶσ’ ᾿Αφροδίτα.
The meaning is just on the far side of language. It is the meaning which in moments of astonishing excitement and stress we perceive in our minds without words; it is the meaning that Dostoevsky (hampered as he was by prose and as we are by translation) leads us to by some astonishing run up the scale of emotions and points at but cannot indicate; the meaning that Shakespeare succeeds in snaring.
Aeschylus thus will not give, as Sophocles gives, the very words that people might have spoken, only so arranged that they have in some mysterious way a general force, a symbolic power, nor like Euripides will he combine incongruities and thus enlarge his little space, as a small room is enlarged by mirrors in odd corners. By the bold and running use of metaphor he will amplify and give us, not the thing itself, but the reverberation and reflection which, taken into his mind, the thing has made; close enough to the original to illustrate it, remote enough to heighten, enlarge, and make splendid.
Aeschylus, Agamemnon, 37-39
“This house itself, if it found a voice,
Would be able to speak most clearly. I am talking
Willingly to those who know and forget for those who know nothing.”
